“Flesh of Their Flesh, Bone of Their Bone”

Abstract

Abstract This chapter identifies a concept of boundness in James Baldwin’s work and asks how it offers an alternative and embodied way to theorize racial identity, racialized violence, and interracial solidarity. The chapter traces how, in contrast to Black nationalist and integrationist accounts of racial domination, and as an intervention into white liberal forms of political identity, Baldwin demanded a reckoning with the enfleshed and intimate history of the production of race in the U.S. as the foundation for transformed forms of political identification. Baldwin’s invocation of a Black–white kinship narrative extended a longer lineage of appeals from Maria Stewart to Ida B. Wells and worked as a specific political and theoretical intervention into dominant racial discourses in his time. Finally, the chapter explores how Baldwin’s attention to the body in his theorization of race offers critical resources for anti-racist work today.